The Extra Effort Top-Performing Advisors Put In

They're just pushing papers around the office until their four hours are up for the day, then heading home to hang out with their families.

Too many advisors listen to podcasts like mine, The Perfect RIA, cut their workday in half, and move on to more enjoyable activities. Then those advisors are surprised when the money isn't rolling in.

Those advisors are missing one crucial element separating their coasting practice from a perfect RIA: They aren't actually working.

Creating a perfect RIA isn't about skipping out on your work but finding the most effective ways to complete your job.

If you made poor decisions playing office throughout the day and haven't done any meaningful work, then practice for your seminar, prospect meeting, or client event at night.

You've made poor decisions. Take your lumps and put in your practice reps.

Practice, practice, practice

Are you operating under the guise of running a lifestyle practice, or are you putting the time into the tasks that generate income?

When I'm planning for a client meeting, the entire office practices. We go through our checklist of scripts, situations, and interactions. We have a dress rehearsal where my entire team dresses for success.

I practice my surge meeting agenda word for word, using actual client reports as if that client is present in my conference room.

I refuse to walk into a client meeting without and an agenda and knowing exactly what I want to say. I come in fully prepared for every curve ball and question the client could throw at me. Sure, we'll only get through a fraction of the material, but I won't be surprised and unprepared.

To deliver massive value, you can't practice your client-facing meetings once and then pray that the client doesn't surprise you with a tricky question. Practice the agenda until you've mastered it; there's no other way around it.

Direct correlations

The top-performing advisors, the ones that are delivering the most value (as reflected by their income), are the advisors who are doing the most challenging things.

Nobody likes to practice

• seminars;

• their prospect process; or

• content creation.

But those are the hard things you must do to succeed.

I was confident I had great information prepared when I started creating content. I thought I was ready to deliver massive value through video productions. Then I turned to the camera, and with the lights in my face, my mind went blank. I had nothing.

Great news – I decided it was a practice reel and tried it again. And again.

I took about 10 to 15 takes to get a final video product I was pleased with. Now that I have thousands of videos and presentations under my belt, I can usually nail the recording in one or two takes.

But there was a lot of learning between my first video and my hundredth – and even more perfecting what happened between 100 to 1,000 videos. I would never have learned to create valuable content without those repetitions.

Master your craft

For advisors aspiring to be top performers, you must recognize that everything you do counts. Everything hurts, or it helps – there is no neutral ground in between.

Regarding client interactions, every aspect of your delivery matters: the fit of your suit, the room temperature, the markers you use, and your position at the table or on the stage.

Your body language and your delivery matter.

Get those things down so well that they're engrained in your muscle memory and embedded in your subconscious.

Prospect meetings and client events are game days, and you have money on the line. Unexpected things will happen. You will get distracted and don't want to be caught reading from the slides.

Want to see how well you're prepared for your next seminar? Practice at home and shine a bright light on your face while your kids run wild around you. If you get distracted and can't deliver your entire seminar, you haven't practiced enough.

Master your presentation to such a level that your subconscious is running the show. When you reach this level of mastery, your conscious brain is free to engage with your audience.

I can sense the shift in body language when clients have questions. I can tease questions out, not because Bob has his hand waving over his head, but because his eye twitched.

His eye twitched.

His expression changed.

I can pick up these subtle changes because my attention isn't focused on what I will say next; I know the entire seminar by heart.

Getting to this point is arduous. And most advisors won't make it to this level. Instead, they will be okay with mediocrity.

Sure, many advisors will make a good income, but you'll never achieve rockstar status if you skip the hard things.

Action Items

Whatever you're working on, don't skip the demanding reps – even if it means standing there with your eyes closed and visualizing your presentation 100 times.

Identify one thing you could do to 10x your value. I don't mean 10x the quantity of something, but increasing the value of what you do in surge, your prospect process, or client communications. This could be more visualizing, practicing your scripts, or getting a speech coach.

Matthew Jarvis, CFP®, ChFC, is the co-founder of The Perfect RIA, one of the industry's most recognized advisor training platforms. Just 10 years prior, Jarvis was buried in debt, with a badly struggling practice and a morning routine of trying to figure out how to quit the industry without looking like a failure. Through several turns of fate, Jarvis clawed from near failure to the top of the industry. Today, alongside running his incredibly profitable and successful practice, Jarvis guides other advisors on duplicating his success in their practice.

Read more articles by Matthew Jarvis